WSMHS & Other Acronyms

Yesterday while I was at the Department of Family and Children's Services (DFACS) attempting to get food stamps, my good buddy Micah dropped by. Since I wasn't at home, he left this note on my front door, Martin Luther-style. Too bad I missed him.

I probably wouldn't have missed him if DFACS wasn't way the hell on the other side of town, right next door to the big Death Star-esque mental health agency here in North Georgia. I guess you could say that yesterday, while Micah wanted to hike, I was caught between two bureaucratic acronyms.

In case you're wondering why I'm trying to get food stamps, it's because I was recently downsized, along with my twenty or so fellow employees. The hospital top brass decided they no longer needed a psychiatric unit, citing our historically low census as a vague affirmation that the mentally ill population of Athens, Georgia was obviously no longer in need of an emergency stabilization unit. "They are obviously finding support elsewhere," we were all told in a staff meeting. Welcome to the surreal world of privatized health care...After that meeting, Human Resources sent out an unofficial memo to the employees of the psychiatric unit that said "Do Not Talk To The Press" about the closing of the unit. A few days later, a brief story ran in the local paper about the closing of the unit. it was carefully worded and contained little actual content, save that the decision to close the unit was an "economic" one.

The real reason our census was low was because the hospital itself has been, over the years, placing ever-increasingly restrictive limitations on criteria for admission to the psychiatric unit. The hospital I worked for is not alone in this. Riding the arc of Ronald Reagan's lean, mean deinstitutionalization of mental health patients, psychiatric units all over America have become increasingly harder to gain access to. Once there, patients in crisis have been receiving less and less specialized care, and for a shorter duration. "Emergency stabilization" has become the new standard of care, which is really industry code for "expedite everything, and get them back on the street as soon as possible."

For any community hospital, the next logical step in the continual deterioration of mental health services would be to erase them altogether. This makes economic sense, because psychiatric units are viewed as somewhat of an economic thorn in the side of any hospital. Schizophrenics and drug addicts usually can't pay their medical bills, in other words. The assumption is that, once back on the street, a newly "stabilized" (i.e. medicated) patient will be able to find adequate support at an understaffed, underfunded bureaucratic quagmire of the state government that functions as well as can be expected given the circumstances. Am I the only person that thinks this is the World's Shittiest Mental Health System? (WSMHS)

Anyway, all that is to say that I now no longer have a job. I am an unemployed psychotherapist trying to get food stamps. And if the Gods smile on me and I actually qualify for food stamps, I have to say that it will have been worth it to have missed a hike with my friend Micah. Perhaps then I will invite him and his wife over for government cheese nachos. From my back porch, we can watch the sun set on Western Civilization...